I can't say it's the case for Tony Hawks or Metroid as I don't know enough about them, but the problems with it in Halo 3 and various other games that have had to take chunks out their multiplayer plans is to do with the massive maps you get in multiplayer games nowadays.
Many people in response to this story are asking why you can't just teleport the player like in the local coop modes, well, that's actually the problem not the solution. A system can only hold a limited amount of a games assets (terrain, textures, player models and so forth) ready in memory at any one time, on a local coop match the system has the assetts for both players locations in memory and that's just fine for teleporting, because when player B teleports to player A, player B's section of the screen can just use the same assets in memory as player A's, across a relatively slow network like the internet however this option to share memory isn't feasible.
It's not an impossible problem to solve by any means, if player A is telling player B where they are and/or vice versa then player B's system can keep track better, but this takes a lot longer to implement and test, hence why Bungie probably can't get it ready for launch. There are other solutions of course, you could say have a setup where player B is shown a teleportation animation whilst the system loads the required data, but that tends to be tacky and ruins the gameplay a fair bit.
Some might ask why it works okay in other games, well, even in games like Gears you're not allowed to stray far from your team mate at all, so it's the case there that both players are forced to progress at such a similar speed through the game, that should player A need to load new world data, player B will need to also, so by simply keeping the players close you're basically forcing each system to have the same data in memory, so that when the players do need to warp together, player B doesn't have to fetch hardly any, if any data at all that it didn't already have loaded. Of course, this option is available to Bungie too, but is it really worth completely changing their storyline, likely for the worse just to do this right now when they could keep a much better storyline and just do coop another way later?
It seems to be a combination of the storyline requiring the players to be well apart and the massive size of maps in games nowadays compared to the relatively small amount of memory available to consoles. Memory is less important for consoles of course, because they're much more streamlined for transferring game-like data between subsystems than PCs which have to be rather more generic but it's still a bottleneck at the end of the day, one which would cause a noticeable pause to the player if suddenly they had to dump the current few hundred megabytes of assets and load some more instead, as opposed to streaming it as in say games like Saints Row. You might ask why Crackdown doesn't have this problem, it's basically again a game design issue, there's no situation where player B would ever be warped to player A other than say, when you die and so forth and have to move to a spawn point, but it's okay for the pause in the game to load new assets in this situation because the player is busy respawning! Outside that, players just run to each other so the game only needs to stream data slowly, which is like say, loading a few hundred mb of assets over the period of maybe 5minutes that it takes to reach each other vs. trying to load a few hundred mb instantly when a player teleports half way round the world.
This article is before the 1 billion put aside to resolve the RROD problem of course, but I'm not entirely convinced that $315million + $1billion equals $7billion still.
Still, this isn't the first time an anonymous coward has come forth and made near identical daft, unfounded claims with pretend knowledge of the super-secret Microsoft forum club insider information, so I'm guessing we should assume you're to be a regular troll now? I'm not terribly sure how you can possibly even begin to claim the 360 is the most hated product amongst Microsoft employees, even if said employees did hate some Microsoft product or another, let's face it, Microsoft has a whole lot more crappy, unsuccessful, uninteresting stuff to hate than the 360, the Zune for example?
The biggest problem is that the games they're showing off at E3 now, are the games we were originally promised at the Wii's release, and then in March, and now at the end of the year.
Apart from Wii sports I really don't find much reason to play my Wii now, I don't mind Rayman, but we're talking 30minutes or so once a month kind of thing here. I'm convinced this will change with the Wii becoming the number one console in terms of games line up by Christmas 2008, but for Christmas this year the Wii still remains mediocre.
MS seems to have won the games lineup for this christmas by a longshot, Sony second place, mostly with games that are dual-platform 360/PS3 and Nintendo trailing behind with games that were due out a year before and nothing much particularly new or terribly intersting. I think the difficulty for Nintendo is the fact that games do have to be written/re-written specifically for the Wii, whereas Sony/MS can live off each other's successes with ports across similarly powered hardware with similar control systems. The Wii has a lot of backers however, so this reinforces my view that given some period of time the Wii's lineup will be strengthened heavily, hence my comment that I'm placing my bets on Christmas 2008 for the Wii to really shine.
I'm definitely looking forward to these two games still, the problem is, I was looking forward to them far more in the lead up to last Christmas. Regardless, Nintendo themselves have nothing to worry about, the Wii is selling well now and even if sales did drop they've got a plenty big enough warchest to keep themselves going until they can start throwing out the heavyweight titles that everyone wants.
It's not needed in this country, as with the Stephen Pakeerah murder, the Labour goverment has demonstrated this nation has an unwritten law:
If one of your relations has been the victim of a particularly violent crime, you have the right to decide the entire nations laws and rules without any kind of sensible debate.
This change to laws surrounding pornography was a kneejerk reaction in response to the violent rape of a teacher some time ago, the person who carried out the rape was found to look at porn on the internet, as a result the teacher and her family called for BDSM type porn to be banned, the goverment obliged.
As with the refusal to classify Manhunt 2, the media deserves some of the blame in perpetuating the lie that films, games, books etc. can turn people into criminals. Getting rid of our nanny-state Labour goverment is going to be the first big step in reversing this kind of rubbish.
MySQL just seems more common and I can't see that changing. Pretty much every web development book and site uses MySQL for database teachings so as people come into web development I'd argue it's just going to increase the MySQL user base even more.
For most people's web development needs MySQL just does what you need. Chances are if you need something MySQL doesn't have then you're already competent enough to not need a package like this and set it all up yourself anyway, this just makes it easier for those who are relatively new to web development to jump straight in.
I'm just about to start learning RoR myself and I just run my practice servers as VMs so for people like me, it's pretty easy to just setup a Linux VM, install a package like this and knuckle straight down with learning RoR. When I've got a decent understanding of it and am sure it's something I really do want to continue with I'll start to pay more attention to setting it up in a production environment and I'll start looking further into different databasing options and so forth.
The real question is is there any reason they shouldn't?
As yet there's still no proof that games in any way negatively effect a persons mentality in a violent manner. For every bit of so called evidence i.e. "columbine killers played games, games must be to blame" there's plenty of equally unfounded counter-evidence, for example, since Grand theft autos original release in the US, car crime in the US has dropped drastically, perhaps people are happy comitting their crime virtually? Or how about the guy in the UK a few weeks back who risked his life to save others in a gunpoint robbery and who was also a counterstrike player - we could just as well say games make people into heroes.
Neither scenario really shows that games improve society unless we apply the kind of idiotic logic that is applied each time someone kills someone and it's discovered that said person also played computer games now and again - well duh, most kids do.
It's the same mentality that makes so many people think Islam is bad, well, it's not (well, no more so than other religions), there are bad people that follow Islam and that's the difference, but we can't ban Islam or kill all muslims just because of a few bad followers as it's not Islam itself that's to blame.
If we're going to focus on anything, we should be focussing on why some kids are carrying guns and trying to immitate gangster rappers in the first place, why some people are willing to murder in the name of their religion and so on and so forth. Banning some form of media like this, be it a game, a film, a book or music just masks over the problem, it certainly doesn't make it go away, the kids that would kill are still going to end up killing, it's just a sad fact of our world today.
What the BBC report fails to mention is that the copy of Manhunt involved in the Stephen Pakeerah case was actually owned by the murdered boy not the murderer - this is something that was acknowledged by the police.
Whilst the BBC report mentions that the police have come forward to say that the game had no impact on the killing, it's sad that they omit the very fact that frees the game from any blame, that as mentioned above, the victim owned the game. To me this suggests that they were clutching at straws to find an example of why the game should indeed be banned, and when unable to find one figured they'd use the next best thing and omit the facts that would negate the use of this example.
Of course, it was only yesterday we were hearing about how the BBC has a serious bias problem in it's reporting, so it really comes as no suprise. It's just a shame that only a day later they insist on proving their fault with the fact they once more publish half truths and bring up an irrelevant murder to try and justify the ban.
I'd argue, that the whole reason Manhunt 2 has been banned is not because there is a problem with the game as such, but because the BBFC felt it had no choice due to the public uproar various anti-video game media establishments like the BBC have produced - you only have to look at this weeks Panorama for a top notch example of the problem. How could the BBFC allow a game to be published, that as far as the general public know is responsible for a murder? It's hard to blame the BBFC on this one but easy to see that the British media is the real problem here.
You sound roughly about as biased as the comparison chart. To be fair the OP has a point.
If it's about physical attributes why does it list non-physical attributes? and only one of the few physical attributes?
Slimness is all consumers care about? If that was the case everyone would be happy with the iPaq phones because they're so slim, of course in reality, the issue is they're too wide for most people to want in their pockets. Personally I also prefer phones to be light, so for me weight is one of the largest issues.
As for features well, yes it does have a few but not as many as the new Nokia and Sony offerings. Supports 3rd party development? this is a joke right? again, other offerings have full Java and some even C++ application support - that's an awful lot more than rich internet apps which nice, are still extremely limited - again, you aint EVER going to see anything like this on iPhones with their supposed 3rd party application support:
DRM is fundamentally flawed, and hence can and always will be broken should the need arise. If BD+ starts getting used, BD+ will start being broken.
It wouldn't matter if something you stick in your PC had God-DRM mark XIV or whatever magical DRM the movie industry has wet dreams about, it's still DRM and it's still just as breakable.
The Nokia N95 has built in GPS, 5 megapixel camera, capable of recording near DVD quality video at 30 FPS, full support for 3rd party applications (such as Doom, multiplayer capable via Bluetooth) and so on.
The only thing these phones don't have is touch screen, but I'd question whether it's really that great to have, afaik they haven't go round the problem of greasy finger-prints making you need to clean screen every 5 seconds problem with them yet.
The reality is, compared to offerings like this and like Nokia's offerings the iPhone looks really dated, 2 megapixel camera? no GPS? no 3rd party apps?, what's more the iPhone is actually even heavier than the N95! The iPhone is essentially, to us Europeans/Asians at least the kind of thing we'd have expected at the low end of the market around 3 - 4 years ago, as an example I used to have a Nokia 7650 around 5 years ago, other than the things that improve with age, such as screen quality, megapixels on camera, memory this phone actually still did more than the iPhone can out the box, it could also still run Doom at full speed such that it was perfectly playable.
So again, I ask where does the iPhone actually fit in? It's a low end phone with a high end price, the only people over here I can imagine buying it are those that want a phone that interacts well with their Apple hardware, which isn't exactly the biggest target demographic to aim for! Still, I guess I shouldn't speak too soon, the iPod was extremely feature-crippled compared to other portable audio players yet I still fell into the trap of buying one so maybe the Apple hype machine will pull the wool over our eyes once more;)
A good start would be reading what they themselves wrote - that it's all about the games, that is, remove the Bluray drive and drop the price by £100 - £150. Personally I really don't care about it, when HD movies really matter to me I'll buy a player, or in fact, more likely, I'll just stream them/download them from some video download service (kinda like MS' XBox live video marketplace if they ever expand it outside the US).
Seriously, asking slashdot users to make a choice between Sony or religion?
It's just not a choice you can ask slashdot users to make, it's like one of those "If you had two kids and they were in a burning building and could only save one, which would you save?" kind of questions.
I'm not sure benchmarks really matter. It's not as if either of the cards are so bad that you're getting screwed by buying one instead of the other.
I've been using dedicated graphics cards since my old 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3D, since then I've had various ATI/nVidia cards and I've never been in the situation where I've thought "damn I wish I bought the other company's card".
I used to be someone that thought it was great to get 3 more fps than the other guy but when I came to realise that whilst I got 3 more fps in one game, and he got 5 more fps in another game that was OpenGL instead of DirectX or whatever. It became obvious that it's not as clear cut as one card is better than the other in terms of frame rates, it depends on the graphics API, the driver releases, the OS, the other hardware in the system, the game settings and on and on. Personally I prefer nVidia, but that's only because they have better developer support and I've had a better experience with the quality of their drivers over ATI's, image quality, features and frames per second has never once been an issue for me and I'm sure this is true for all but those people who think that getting an extra 3 more fps in game X actually makes the blindest bit of difference in the world.
I was thinking exactly the same thing when watching it last night. Way to completely destroy the credibility panorama had in a single episode.
When their reporting of wifi was so utterly flawed and biased, how can we possibly know whether their reporting of Scientology was any different? I really despise Scientology but I no longer trust Panorama as an unbiased source of information on any topic, including Scientology. Did Panorama for example just hunt out some fringe nutcase Scientologists to highlight their point in much the same way that Islamic suicide bombers are usually used to claim that the whole of Islam is evil? I think their reporting of Scientology probably was accurate, however it does make you think again.
Well again, on the show they said the woman in question was able to tell when wifi was on or off 2/3rds of the time in tests, 66% isn't really a high enough chance for me to believe hers is a real known problem, particularly when they didn't explain her testing methodology, if they only ran 3 tests for example then get 2 out of 3 right is in the correct range of a 50% chance of getting it right by mere guessing should she have got a 4th test wrong.
They did however mention that Sweden recognises electro-sensitivity as an official disability so there is perhaps some credibility in the whole idea, how much is still questionable of course.
You obviously didn't see the program, one person in it complaining wifi gives her headaches had covered her entire room in tin foil to protect her from it all:p
Frankly the BBC was irresponsible in showing this episode of Panorama. I'm against censorship, but informational programs produced by a tax-payer funded media outlet should not be spouting such paranoid, biased crap as Panorama did last night.
This is arguably the worst case of the BBC scrambling for ratings I've ever witnessed. Never before have I seen them stoop so low to try and raise viewing figures. I was sat watching it waiting for the part where they offer the opposing view of the situation to allow people to make their own minds up, unfortunately however, that never came - it was one sided anti-wifi propaganda all the way through, from start to finish.
About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
I'm no expert when it comes to wifi, radiation and so forth and I'm not claiming that wifi is 100% safe - it may well pose risks. The problem with the program however seemed to be that it's entire argument is based on the premise that there is some other danger to human health from radiation other than the heating effect, and from what I've read elsewhere, there is absolutely no evidence that there is any effect other than the heating effect. I'm sure those with better scientific knowledge may be able to correct me on this if I'm wrong, but if it's true as has been reported by other news outlets (and in fact even by the BBC themselves online) then the majority of the program was fundamentally flawed in it's arguments.
What bothers me most is that we've gone from one lazy teacher looking for an excuse to get time off work claiming that wifi gives him headaches to a national wifi scandal. The worst part is that most reports that refer to the teacher in question who sparked this row ignore the fact that in scientific tests the teacher could neither a) tell whether wifi was on or off and b) now claims he gets these headaches wherever he is, even when not around wifi!
If Wifi does indeed pose a threat then I agree we need to do something, but thus far this seems equivalent to the whole terrorism/think of the children/drugs/computer games make people kill FUD.
"So you are claiming that duck and cover is equally as bad a choice, as someone taking a direct approach and stopping the shooter? Seriously?"
Well this attitude pretty much sums up the problem, too many people think life is like counterstrike, or die hard or whatever. The fact of the matter is, a bullet travels to you a hell of a lot faster than you can possibly ever reach the gunman. Even if there's a few of you one bullet could well take down a few at once. It's just not that easy to stop someone with a gun unfortunately - let alone two guns, whatever Hollywood might like to have us believe.
"Right. That's how at least one of the professors got killed, by him shooting through the door. Better chance than sitting and waiting, sure, but so much less effective than if he'd had the means to effectively defend himself."
Yeah, he did get killed you're right there. His entire class survived however, where if the door hadn't been blocked because he'd tried to fight back he could've risked having his entire class die. If he'd managed to get away from the door in time like his students he'd also have survived too, either way, opening the door would've made it far more likely that not only he died, but everyone else in the room with him.
"In the case of VT, there wasn't a _get to safety_ option, was there."
You mean apart from for those that did actually survive by blocking themselves in and staying away from the corridor windows? Or those that jumped out the windows on the lower floors and so forth?
"Waiting for professional help is what got them killed."
No, not realising what was happening and hence not having chance to respond is what got them killed. You just don't expect this type of thing to happen. Only those few who did realise what was going on and did block themselves in safely or escape out the windows survived (ignoring the ones who the gunman didn't reach because he killed himself first of course). The fact is that those barricaded in were able to stay safe until the armed response teams did actually arrive, make the building safe and get them out.
"ONE teacher with a gun could have stopped it at something less than 32 deaths."
"Could" being the key term here of course. One teacher with a gun "could" also have died first and given the shooter a full magazine of extra ammo to kill even more people, or he "could" also have accidently shot more innocents, or he "could" accidently discharge his weapon outside of an event like this killing someone or he "could" unintentionally discharge his weapon in a heated dispute outside of this kind of situation. When soldiers with years of training in an enviroment where you're taught, often even brainwashed in how to kill, still manage to freeze up when it comes to shooting the enemy what makes you think a teacher would be capable of doing it?
"Even knowing that his intended victims were allowed to carry if they so chose might have deterred his entire rampage - it was obviously directed at helpless people."
I suppose the US soldiers in Iraq carrying guns deter suicide bombers and snipers too do they? The fact is if someone doesn't fear death, as has been the case with pretty much all people carrying out gun masacres in the last 10 years then they don't give a shit whether their target may or may not have a gun - they want to die anyway, as long as they take people with them then it's all good to them.
"Lemmings aren't the ones fighting the killer and dying, lemmings are the ones dying while hoping that "well trained police/soldiers" will show up in time to save them."
I just hope it never happens to you, it's just not that easy to disarm someone. Even people trained for years in self-defence will always be trained that confronting and disarming the person should be the last possible option when no other option such as escape is available. It's sad that people say "Oh well I'd have disarmed him" when the fact is, those very people would more likely be the ones frozen up, cowering under the d
I don't think he was suggesting that anyone hide under a desk, because that's equally as stupid as going after a gunman - both are only reasonable options when you have no other choice.
I think he was suggesting more to get the hell away from the area via a safe route, or otherwise get somewhere the gunman can't get to (i.e. blockade yourself into a room much like the students that survived Virginia Tech did).
Both your suggestions are prime examples of what the person you were responding to meant when he mentioned lemmings - people who just sit and die and people who, well, go and die. Both are equally stupid when there's another more blatantly sensible option - get to safety and let well trained police/soldiers wearing bulletproof vests and armed with flashbangs deal with the guy with a gun.
Why would MS need to create a Resistance killer...
on
Halo 3 Beta Impressions
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· Score: 4, Funny
If Sony has managed to lower the cost of production all it means is that they're making less of a loss per console. If they really were making $300 loss per console as has been reported I'm sure they're more interested in cutting that loss than giving consumers a price cut.
I doubt very much that if they drop their loss per console to $150 that they'll consider dropping the price by even $50 back to a $200 loss.
The only reason I think they'll be able to justify a price cut is if they start racking it in via game sales as that's where the profit comes from with these systems, if they make enough profit by selling games then they can justify decreasing loss (or decreasing profit if they stop making a loss) with the hardware.
Whilst I certainly understand why you say that, it's sad that that is something that is said.
I'm not particularly old, I'm 24, but even in my lifetime, in the last few years since I've started taking notice of the world I've seen free speech on the internet as something that's slipped away at a worrying speed.
To get to the point, naming a site like "The Pirate Bay" doesn't necessarily infer that they're guilty of any crime. If I were to make a site with a tongue in cheek name "The gun murderers hideout" which could contain information about various guns and such should I be arrested for killing someone with a gun? The argument holds with TPB, just because they're providing materials that can potentially aid infringement doesn't mean they're necessarily guilty of a crime.
Perhaps what I find the most worrying about this change in people's view is that I wonder if perhaps the MPAA/RIAA have achieved more than we'd like to believe, with their attacks on piracy, coupled with many media outlets being incapable of correctly reporting on the issue people are beginning to give ground to the corporations who are slowly taking away our right to free speech.
For a good example of the media's misreporting see The Register's coverage of the HDDVD fiasco - they even make the mistake of suggesting it's all about piracy, it's a sad state of affairs when a site that previously understood the problem now unfortunately is part of the problem.
There is some hope however as the HDDVD key situation has proved, there's still plenty of people out there willing to fight the good fight, coupled with the RIAA's increasing amount of failures in court we're slowly pushing back.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say it's the case for Tony Hawks or Metroid as I don't know enough about them, but the problems with it in Halo 3 and various other games that have had to take chunks out their multiplayer plans is to do with the massive maps you get in multiplayer games nowadays.
Many people in response to this story are asking why you can't just teleport the player like in the local coop modes, well, that's actually the problem not the solution. A system can only hold a limited amount of a games assets (terrain, textures, player models and so forth) ready in memory at any one time, on a local coop match the system has the assetts for both players locations in memory and that's just fine for teleporting, because when player B teleports to player A, player B's section of the screen can just use the same assets in memory as player A's, across a relatively slow network like the internet however this option to share memory isn't feasible.
It's not an impossible problem to solve by any means, if player A is telling player B where they are and/or vice versa then player B's system can keep track better, but this takes a lot longer to implement and test, hence why Bungie probably can't get it ready for launch. There are other solutions of course, you could say have a setup where player B is shown a teleportation animation whilst the system loads the required data, but that tends to be tacky and ruins the gameplay a fair bit.
Some might ask why it works okay in other games, well, even in games like Gears you're not allowed to stray far from your team mate at all, so it's the case there that both players are forced to progress at such a similar speed through the game, that should player A need to load new world data, player B will need to also, so by simply keeping the players close you're basically forcing each system to have the same data in memory, so that when the players do need to warp together, player B doesn't have to fetch hardly any, if any data at all that it didn't already have loaded. Of course, this option is available to Bungie too, but is it really worth completely changing their storyline, likely for the worse just to do this right now when they could keep a much better storyline and just do coop another way later?
It seems to be a combination of the storyline requiring the players to be well apart and the massive size of maps in games nowadays compared to the relatively small amount of memory available to consoles. Memory is less important for consoles of course, because they're much more streamlined for transferring game-like data between subsystems than PCs which have to be rather more generic but it's still a bottleneck at the end of the day, one which would cause a noticeable pause to the player if suddenly they had to dump the current few hundred megabytes of assets and load some more instead, as opposed to streaming it as in say games like Saints Row. You might ask why Crackdown doesn't have this problem, it's basically again a game design issue, there's no situation where player B would ever be warped to player A other than say, when you die and so forth and have to move to a spawn point, but it's okay for the pause in the game to load new assets in this situation because the player is busy respawning! Outside that, players just run to each other so the game only needs to stream data slowly, which is like say, loading a few hundred mb of assets over the period of maybe 5minutes that it takes to reach each other vs. trying to load a few hundred mb instantly when a player teleports half way round the world.
I don't know how people count to 7 billion in your world, but apparently it's quite different to how people count to 7 billion in the real world.
t ory=13698
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
This article is before the 1 billion put aside to resolve the RROD problem of course, but I'm not entirely convinced that $315million + $1billion equals $7billion still.
Still, this isn't the first time an anonymous coward has come forth and made near identical daft, unfounded claims with pretend knowledge of the super-secret Microsoft forum club insider information, so I'm guessing we should assume you're to be a regular troll now? I'm not terribly sure how you can possibly even begin to claim the 360 is the most hated product amongst Microsoft employees, even if said employees did hate some Microsoft product or another, let's face it, Microsoft has a whole lot more crappy, unsuccessful, uninteresting stuff to hate than the 360, the Zune for example?
...at Nintendo's E3 lineup in general this year.
The biggest problem is that the games they're showing off at E3 now, are the games we were originally promised at the Wii's release, and then in March, and now at the end of the year.
Apart from Wii sports I really don't find much reason to play my Wii now, I don't mind Rayman, but we're talking 30minutes or so once a month kind of thing here. I'm convinced this will change with the Wii becoming the number one console in terms of games line up by Christmas 2008, but for Christmas this year the Wii still remains mediocre.
MS seems to have won the games lineup for this christmas by a longshot, Sony second place, mostly with games that are dual-platform 360/PS3 and Nintendo trailing behind with games that were due out a year before and nothing much particularly new or terribly intersting. I think the difficulty for Nintendo is the fact that games do have to be written/re-written specifically for the Wii, whereas Sony/MS can live off each other's successes with ports across similarly powered hardware with similar control systems. The Wii has a lot of backers however, so this reinforces my view that given some period of time the Wii's lineup will be strengthened heavily, hence my comment that I'm placing my bets on Christmas 2008 for the Wii to really shine.
I'm definitely looking forward to these two games still, the problem is, I was looking forward to them far more in the lead up to last Christmas. Regardless, Nintendo themselves have nothing to worry about, the Wii is selling well now and even if sales did drop they've got a plenty big enough warchest to keep themselves going until they can start throwing out the heavyweight titles that everyone wants.
It's not needed in this country, as with the Stephen Pakeerah murder, the Labour goverment has demonstrated this nation has an unwritten law:
If one of your relations has been the victim of a particularly violent crime, you have the right to decide the entire nations laws and rules without any kind of sensible debate.
This change to laws surrounding pornography was a kneejerk reaction in response to the violent rape of a teacher some time ago, the person who carried out the rape was found to look at porn on the internet, as a result the teacher and her family called for BDSM type porn to be banned, the goverment obliged.
As with the refusal to classify Manhunt 2, the media deserves some of the blame in perpetuating the lie that films, games, books etc. can turn people into criminals. Getting rid of our nanny-state Labour goverment is going to be the first big step in reversing this kind of rubbish.
MySQL just seems more common and I can't see that changing. Pretty much every web development book and site uses MySQL for database teachings so as people come into web development I'd argue it's just going to increase the MySQL user base even more.
For most people's web development needs MySQL just does what you need. Chances are if you need something MySQL doesn't have then you're already competent enough to not need a package like this and set it all up yourself anyway, this just makes it easier for those who are relatively new to web development to jump straight in.
I'm just about to start learning RoR myself and I just run my practice servers as VMs so for people like me, it's pretty easy to just setup a Linux VM, install a package like this and knuckle straight down with learning RoR. When I've got a decent understanding of it and am sure it's something I really do want to continue with I'll start to pay more attention to setting it up in a production environment and I'll start looking further into different databasing options and so forth.
Sorry us Brits have already got our eye on it.
;)
What, you think we took the Falkland islands back for the sheep and penguins?
...wondering WTF an invalid temperature is?
Surely a temperature is always going to be valid unless these processors only support an extremely small set of possible temperature values?
Anyone have more insight into what an invalid temperature might be and how it might be caused?
The real question is is there any reason they shouldn't?
As yet there's still no proof that games in any way negatively effect a persons mentality in a violent manner. For every bit of so called evidence i.e. "columbine killers played games, games must be to blame" there's plenty of equally unfounded counter-evidence, for example, since Grand theft autos original release in the US, car crime in the US has dropped drastically, perhaps people are happy comitting their crime virtually? Or how about the guy in the UK a few weeks back who risked his life to save others in a gunpoint robbery and who was also a counterstrike player - we could just as well say games make people into heroes.
Neither scenario really shows that games improve society unless we apply the kind of idiotic logic that is applied each time someone kills someone and it's discovered that said person also played computer games now and again - well duh, most kids do.
It's the same mentality that makes so many people think Islam is bad, well, it's not (well, no more so than other religions), there are bad people that follow Islam and that's the difference, but we can't ban Islam or kill all muslims just because of a few bad followers as it's not Islam itself that's to blame.
If we're going to focus on anything, we should be focussing on why some kids are carrying guns and trying to immitate gangster rappers in the first place, why some people are willing to murder in the name of their religion and so on and so forth. Banning some form of media like this, be it a game, a film, a book or music just masks over the problem, it certainly doesn't make it go away, the kids that would kill are still going to end up killing, it's just a sad fact of our world today.
What the BBC report fails to mention is that the copy of Manhunt involved in the Stephen Pakeerah case was actually owned by the murdered boy not the murderer - this is something that was acknowledged by the police.
Whilst the BBC report mentions that the police have come forward to say that the game had no impact on the killing, it's sad that they omit the very fact that frees the game from any blame, that as mentioned above, the victim owned the game. To me this suggests that they were clutching at straws to find an example of why the game should indeed be banned, and when unable to find one figured they'd use the next best thing and omit the facts that would negate the use of this example.
Of course, it was only yesterday we were hearing about how the BBC has a serious bias problem in it's reporting, so it really comes as no suprise. It's just a shame that only a day later they insist on proving their fault with the fact they once more publish half truths and bring up an irrelevant murder to try and justify the ban.
I'd argue, that the whole reason Manhunt 2 has been banned is not because there is a problem with the game as such, but because the BBFC felt it had no choice due to the public uproar various anti-video game media establishments like the BBC have produced - you only have to look at this weeks Panorama for a top notch example of the problem. How could the BBFC allow a game to be published, that as far as the general public know is responsible for a murder? It's hard to blame the BBFC on this one but easy to see that the British media is the real problem here.
You sound roughly about as biased as the comparison chart. To be fair the OP has a point.
d =1023
If it's about physical attributes why does it list non-physical attributes? and only one of the few physical attributes?
Slimness is all consumers care about? If that was the case everyone would be happy with the iPaq phones because they're so slim, of course in reality, the issue is they're too wide for most people to want in their pockets. Personally I also prefer phones to be light, so for me weight is one of the largest issues.
As for features well, yes it does have a few but not as many as the new Nokia and Sony offerings. Supports 3rd party development? this is a joke right? again, other offerings have full Java and some even C++ application support - that's an awful lot more than rich internet apps which nice, are still extremely limited - again, you aint EVER going to see anything like this on iPhones with their supposed 3rd party application support:
http://www.midlet-review.com/index?content=news&i
It's probably worth noting the iPhone's camera is pretty dire in comparison to the new Sony/Nokia offerings too - 2megapixel vs. 5 megapixel.
DRM is fundamentally flawed, and hence can and always will be broken should the need arise. If BD+ starts getting used, BD+ will start being broken.
It wouldn't matter if something you stick in your PC had God-DRM mark XIV or whatever magical DRM the movie industry has wet dreams about, it's still DRM and it's still just as breakable.
The Nokia N95 has built in GPS, 5 megapixel camera, capable of recording near DVD quality video at 30 FPS, full support for 3rd party applications (such as Doom, multiplayer capable via Bluetooth) and so on.
;)
The only thing these phones don't have is touch screen, but I'd question whether it's really that great to have, afaik they haven't go round the problem of greasy finger-prints making you need to clean screen every 5 seconds problem with them yet.
The reality is, compared to offerings like this and like Nokia's offerings the iPhone looks really dated, 2 megapixel camera? no GPS? no 3rd party apps?, what's more the iPhone is actually even heavier than the N95! The iPhone is essentially, to us Europeans/Asians at least the kind of thing we'd have expected at the low end of the market around 3 - 4 years ago, as an example I used to have a Nokia 7650 around 5 years ago, other than the things that improve with age, such as screen quality, megapixels on camera, memory this phone actually still did more than the iPhone can out the box, it could also still run Doom at full speed such that it was perfectly playable.
So again, I ask where does the iPhone actually fit in? It's a low end phone with a high end price, the only people over here I can imagine buying it are those that want a phone that interacts well with their Apple hardware, which isn't exactly the biggest target demographic to aim for! Still, I guess I shouldn't speak too soon, the iPod was extremely feature-crippled compared to other portable audio players yet I still fell into the trap of buying one so maybe the Apple hype machine will pull the wool over our eyes once more
A good start would be reading what they themselves wrote - that it's all about the games, that is, remove the Bluray drive and drop the price by £100 - £150. Personally I really don't care about it, when HD movies really matter to me I'll buy a player, or in fact, more likely, I'll just stream them/download them from some video download service (kinda like MS' XBox live video marketplace if they ever expand it outside the US).
Seriously, asking slashdot users to make a choice between Sony or religion?
It's just not a choice you can ask slashdot users to make, it's like one of those "If you had two kids and they were in a burning building and could only save one, which would you save?" kind of questions.
I'm not sure benchmarks really matter. It's not as if either of the cards are so bad that you're getting screwed by buying one instead of the other.
I've been using dedicated graphics cards since my old 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3D, since then I've had various ATI/nVidia cards and I've never been in the situation where I've thought "damn I wish I bought the other company's card".
I used to be someone that thought it was great to get 3 more fps than the other guy but when I came to realise that whilst I got 3 more fps in one game, and he got 5 more fps in another game that was OpenGL instead of DirectX or whatever. It became obvious that it's not as clear cut as one card is better than the other in terms of frame rates, it depends on the graphics API, the driver releases, the OS, the other hardware in the system, the game settings and on and on. Personally I prefer nVidia, but that's only because they have better developer support and I've had a better experience with the quality of their drivers over ATI's, image quality, features and frames per second has never once been an issue for me and I'm sure this is true for all but those people who think that getting an extra 3 more fps in game X actually makes the blindest bit of difference in the world.
I was thinking exactly the same thing when watching it last night. Way to completely destroy the credibility panorama had in a single episode.
When their reporting of wifi was so utterly flawed and biased, how can we possibly know whether their reporting of Scientology was any different? I really despise Scientology but I no longer trust Panorama as an unbiased source of information on any topic, including Scientology. Did Panorama for example just hunt out some fringe nutcase Scientologists to highlight their point in much the same way that Islamic suicide bombers are usually used to claim that the whole of Islam is evil? I think their reporting of Scientology probably was accurate, however it does make you think again.
Well again, on the show they said the woman in question was able to tell when wifi was on or off 2/3rds of the time in tests, 66% isn't really a high enough chance for me to believe hers is a real known problem, particularly when they didn't explain her testing methodology, if they only ran 3 tests for example then get 2 out of 3 right is in the correct range of a 50% chance of getting it right by mere guessing should she have got a 4th test wrong.
They did however mention that Sweden recognises electro-sensitivity as an official disability so there is perhaps some credibility in the whole idea, how much is still questionable of course.
You obviously didn't see the program, one person in it complaining wifi gives her headaches had covered her entire room in tin foil to protect her from it all :p
Frankly the BBC was irresponsible in showing this episode of Panorama. I'm against censorship, but informational programs produced by a tax-payer funded media outlet should not be spouting such paranoid, biased crap as Panorama did last night.
This is arguably the worst case of the BBC scrambling for ratings I've ever witnessed. Never before have I seen them stoop so low to try and raise viewing figures. I was sat watching it waiting for the part where they offer the opposing view of the situation to allow people to make their own minds up, unfortunately however, that never came - it was one sided anti-wifi propaganda all the way through, from start to finish.
About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
I'm no expert when it comes to wifi, radiation and so forth and I'm not claiming that wifi is 100% safe - it may well pose risks. The problem with the program however seemed to be that it's entire argument is based on the premise that there is some other danger to human health from radiation other than the heating effect, and from what I've read elsewhere, there is absolutely no evidence that there is any effect other than the heating effect. I'm sure those with better scientific knowledge may be able to correct me on this if I'm wrong, but if it's true as has been reported by other news outlets (and in fact even by the BBC themselves online) then the majority of the program was fundamentally flawed in it's arguments.
What bothers me most is that we've gone from one lazy teacher looking for an excuse to get time off work claiming that wifi gives him headaches to a national wifi scandal. The worst part is that most reports that refer to the teacher in question who sparked this row ignore the fact that in scientific tests the teacher could neither a) tell whether wifi was on or off and b) now claims he gets these headaches wherever he is, even when not around wifi!
If Wifi does indeed pose a threat then I agree we need to do something, but thus far this seems equivalent to the whole terrorism/think of the children/drugs/computer games make people kill FUD.
Well if it's something like attempted murder, then most people probably don't want to run the risk of them trying again and succeeding next time.
"So you are claiming that duck and cover is equally as bad a choice, as someone taking a direct approach and stopping the shooter? Seriously?"
Well this attitude pretty much sums up the problem, too many people think life is like counterstrike, or die hard or whatever. The fact of the matter is, a bullet travels to you a hell of a lot faster than you can possibly ever reach the gunman. Even if there's a few of you one bullet could well take down a few at once. It's just not that easy to stop someone with a gun unfortunately - let alone two guns, whatever Hollywood might like to have us believe.
"Right. That's how at least one of the professors got killed, by him shooting through the door. Better chance than sitting and waiting, sure, but so much less effective than if he'd had the means to effectively defend himself."
Yeah, he did get killed you're right there. His entire class survived however, where if the door hadn't been blocked because he'd tried to fight back he could've risked having his entire class die. If he'd managed to get away from the door in time like his students he'd also have survived too, either way, opening the door would've made it far more likely that not only he died, but everyone else in the room with him.
"In the case of VT, there wasn't a _get to safety_ option, was there."
You mean apart from for those that did actually survive by blocking themselves in and staying away from the corridor windows? Or those that jumped out the windows on the lower floors and so forth?
"Waiting for professional help is what got them killed."
No, not realising what was happening and hence not having chance to respond is what got them killed. You just don't expect this type of thing to happen. Only those few who did realise what was going on and did block themselves in safely or escape out the windows survived (ignoring the ones who the gunman didn't reach because he killed himself first of course). The fact is that those barricaded in were able to stay safe until the armed response teams did actually arrive, make the building safe and get them out.
"ONE teacher with a gun could have stopped it at something less than 32 deaths."
"Could" being the key term here of course. One teacher with a gun "could" also have died first and given the shooter a full magazine of extra ammo to kill even more people, or he "could" also have accidently shot more innocents, or he "could" accidently discharge his weapon outside of an event like this killing someone or he "could" unintentionally discharge his weapon in a heated dispute outside of this kind of situation. When soldiers with years of training in an enviroment where you're taught, often even brainwashed in how to kill, still manage to freeze up when it comes to shooting the enemy what makes you think a teacher would be capable of doing it?
"Even knowing that his intended victims were allowed to carry if they so chose might have deterred his entire rampage - it was obviously directed at helpless people."
I suppose the US soldiers in Iraq carrying guns deter suicide bombers and snipers too do they? The fact is if someone doesn't fear death, as has been the case with pretty much all people carrying out gun masacres in the last 10 years then they don't give a shit whether their target may or may not have a gun - they want to die anyway, as long as they take people with them then it's all good to them.
"Lemmings aren't the ones fighting the killer and dying, lemmings are the ones dying while hoping that "well trained police/soldiers" will show up in time to save them."
I just hope it never happens to you, it's just not that easy to disarm someone. Even people trained for years in self-defence will always be trained that confronting and disarming the person should be the last possible option when no other option such as escape is available. It's sad that people say "Oh well I'd have disarmed him" when the fact is, those very people would more likely be the ones frozen up, cowering under the d
I don't think he was suggesting that anyone hide under a desk, because that's equally as stupid as going after a gunman - both are only reasonable options when you have no other choice.
I think he was suggesting more to get the hell away from the area via a safe route, or otherwise get somewhere the gunman can't get to (i.e. blockade yourself into a room much like the students that survived Virginia Tech did).
Both your suggestions are prime examples of what the person you were responding to meant when he mentioned lemmings - people who just sit and die and people who, well, go and die. Both are equally stupid when there's another more blatantly sensible option - get to safety and let well trained police/soldiers wearing bulletproof vests and armed with flashbangs deal with the guy with a gun.
...When Epic already did it for them?
If Sony has managed to lower the cost of production all it means is that they're making less of a loss per console. If they really were making $300 loss per console as has been reported I'm sure they're more interested in cutting that loss than giving consumers a price cut.
I doubt very much that if they drop their loss per console to $150 that they'll consider dropping the price by even $50 back to a $200 loss.
The only reason I think they'll be able to justify a price cut is if they start racking it in via game sales as that's where the profit comes from with these systems, if they make enough profit by selling games then they can justify decreasing loss (or decreasing profit if they stop making a loss) with the hardware.
Whilst I certainly understand why you say that, it's sad that that is something that is said.
I'm not particularly old, I'm 24, but even in my lifetime, in the last few years since I've started taking notice of the world I've seen free speech on the internet as something that's slipped away at a worrying speed.
To get to the point, naming a site like "The Pirate Bay" doesn't necessarily infer that they're guilty of any crime. If I were to make a site with a tongue in cheek name "The gun murderers hideout" which could contain information about various guns and such should I be arrested for killing someone with a gun? The argument holds with TPB, just because they're providing materials that can potentially aid infringement doesn't mean they're necessarily guilty of a crime.
Perhaps what I find the most worrying about this change in people's view is that I wonder if perhaps the MPAA/RIAA have achieved more than we'd like to believe, with their attacks on piracy, coupled with many media outlets being incapable of correctly reporting on the issue people are beginning to give ground to the corporations who are slowly taking away our right to free speech.
For a good example of the media's misreporting see The Register's coverage of the HDDVD fiasco - they even make the mistake of suggesting it's all about piracy, it's a sad state of affairs when a site that previously understood the problem now unfortunately is part of the problem.
There is some hope however as the HDDVD key situation has proved, there's still plenty of people out there willing to fight the good fight, coupled with the RIAA's increasing amount of failures in court we're slowly pushing back.